Are you tearing your hair out trying to find ways to increase website conversion rates? Often, we spend hours testing different headlines, different calls to actions and even replacing the images. But, unless we come up with a winning headline that creates a big jump in conversions, much of it sees little gains.

Many gurus sprout the benefits of doing these smaller tests – try a green button instead of a blue one etc – when you’re only getting a trickle of traffic already, it’s disheartening to think you might add one new subscriber per week from all this effort. And often it’s after hours of work to create the tests.

Which leads us towards wanting to attract more traffic – because that’s a surefire way to increase your number of leads in a more meaningful way, right? So you spend time on social media campaigns, create a public relations plan and spend money on Facebook ads.

But what if I told you there was a smarter, easier step you could have taken BEFORE this that would see an increase with little effort?

This is where I want to introduce you to HelloBar – and some HelloBar examples.

Because, the reality is, you may have one or two calls to action to your free gift in your blog post or on your landing page, but have you asked them to opt-in just one more time?

How to Increase Website Conversion

This is an experiment I’ve been doing with my media plan template, which I’ve spoken about quite a bit on this blog.

A few months ago, after cleaning my lists of THOUSANDS of names due to GDPR compliance and knowing I’d increase it again quickly due to my website’s SEO traffic, my blog was ‘compromised”. This dramatically affected the volume of traffic and leads I gained from my blog posts.

I was devastated…

I worked really hard at getting a lot of the SEO back and am still working on it. I’ve learnt a lot – much of which I’ll share in coming blog posts, so stay tuned and subscribe so you don’t miss that.

But it was still disheartening to see a big hit in subscriber numbers, after consistently gaining about 400 email subscribers on autopilot a month previously.

Like divine intervention, it was during this rather stressful period that HelloBar reached out to me to do a collaborative project. You may have seen the webinar we did. You can still register to watch it here:

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As part of that, I started to play with HelloBar – and I’ve been quietly surprised.

HelloBar Review and The Pop Up Pain

I’ve never been a fan of pop ups. In fact, I have two tools already on my site for pop ups and barely use them because they’re either too hard to set up or they’re too distracting to readers.

That was, until Lindsey from HelloBar shared in our website conversion webinar together what you could really be doing with the tool.

I made THREE pages of notes during that webinar. So be sure to watch. There’s even a special offer on the tool to access it for FREE when you do.

If you weren’t convinced about pop ups before, like me, you’ll see them from a whole new perspective after the free training.

But here’s what happened with my experiment…

HelloBar Examples of Pop Ups

There are 7 different styles of pop ups you can use in HelloBar, a variety of different calls to action and a multitude of ways to allow them to appear.

You can dive into that a little deeper in the How to set up HelloBar section below.

But for now, let’s dive into some examples that are working for me.

Media Plan example

I created a Takeover Page for my media plan template blog post that appears as someone is exiting the page. The image itself is quite basic and I’ve mimicked the copy from the landing page, which I already know converts well.

The only thing I haven’t added, that may be worth adding in future experiments and A/B split tests, is the line “Before You Go…” This has more of a conversational tone for someone leaving my site.

This blog post (NOT the landing page it leads to) was converting to a lead at 40-50% previously, but has decreased since the “compromise” to about 25-30%. I know – a huge slap in the face.

My guess is the quality of the keywords I was previously ranking for were bringing in more quality and qualified traffic. Thankfully, I can see some of those keywords are climbing back up the Google charts.

Despite this, I wasn’t expecting a huge increase of opt-ins with the Takeover page.

So you can imagine I was pleasantly surprised when after only a month in it’s already getting nearly 8% extra email subscribers to my list. I’ll update this further as I do more tests. But for now, I’m pretty thrilled with that.

That’s 40 additional subscribers after just a month! This is ON TOP OF what the page is already getting.

Storytelling Blogs example

Next was my “business storytelling” blog posts, which are starting to gain more momentum in Google search, but still don’t receive a huge volume of traffic and have relatively low opt-in rates. You can explore which opt-ins tend to work best here.

Again, not expecting a lot, I added my Business Storytelling Map to all of my storytelling opt-ins and, of the 55 people who saw the exit intent pop up, 1 subscribed at 1.8% conversion. Not huge when your traffic numbers are low.

Instead, with my 3 Powerful Stories You Must Tell In Your Business To Attract Perfect-Fit Clients free workshop, I decided to switch to see if this call to action would have more success. I only had 6 days to run it before the workshop went live. So I decided to keep an evergreen version going while the replay was still available.

And while 6 additional webinar subscribers isn’t something to write home about, it did mean saving an additional $20 on Facebook ads over the 15 days. So I’ll take that 3.2% conversion rate.

Mastermind example

The last HelloBar example I want to share with you (for now – I’ll keep updating this post) was to promote The Online Marketing Mastermind starting in February 2019.

Firstly, having just written a blog post about what it’s like inside a mastermind, naturally I thought this was a great place to encourage more interest. While it’s a relatively new blog post, it’s already ranking for a few keywords. So this was a good opportunity to make the most of the Google traffic.

I decided to go the subtle approach and try the traditional hello bar along the top of the page.

Unfortunately, this one has yet to yield any results.

Not deterred, I added the same hello bar to my homepage and have seen a 4.5% clickthrough rate so far.

To improve this, I’ve now enabled the button to wiggle to grab attention and, because that would annoy me, I opted for an “x” in the corner to allow the user to hide the bar if they too were annoyed. But at least the wiggling button brings it to their attention – otherwise I feel it can easily be ignored.

I’d already A/B split tested the headline on a different page – something you can easily do within HelloBar – and changed the language as I wasn’t really sure it was resonating.

I’m still not convinced this is the right option for the blog post, so next is to try an exit intent Takeover page. I’ll keep the hello bar for the homepage.

My goal from this campaign is purely to get people to a call to chat about whether The Online Marketing Mastermind is the right fit for them.

Stay tuned for the results.

I’ll be undertaking more tests for various blog posts and pages and their specific goals. But I think that’s the beauty of HelloBar – you can tailor the pop ups for different types of calls to action.

Whether that’s:

• Send them to a sales page
• Opt into your email list
• Read another blog post
• Register for early bird access

The possibilities are endless.

How to set up HelloBar

There are 3 few key reasons clients reach out to me in the first place – because they:

• get stuck with the story and copywriting,
• get stuck with the strategy (or lack of strategy) and
• get stuck with the tech.

In this section of the post, I’m going to help you overcome the tech with HelloBar, because honestly anyone can set this up. It’s super simple.

Step 1:

Firstly, you need to choose your goal:

Mostly, I choose to collect email addresses or target a URL, as you saw from the examples above.

Step 2:

Next, choose the type of Hello Bar from the many Hellobar examples. There are 5 types:

Traditional hello bar – I’ve found this particularly good for homepages so far.

The Modal – on the webinar Lindsey revealed that The Modal doesn’t always perform as well as other pop ups for most people – which was a huge surprise. Although, everything is up for testing!

The Slider – I’ve yet to use this one, due to the fact I have a MobileMonkey chatbot in the same corner of my website and I’m not sure how the two would perform together.

While you can put it on the other side of the page, the two together will likely take up too much real estate down the bottom of the page. But I do like how this one slides out from the side of the page so people can continue reading if they wish.

Page Takeover – you’ve seen above that this is by far my favourite. However, ONLY if it’s used as an exit intent. I know some use it as a “welcome mat” on their homepage, but I’m not a huge fan. It’s all personal choice.

The lovely people at HelloBar were also able to show me how to highlight the “x” to allow users to exit the pop up, which was hidden due to the soft colours of my main image. As I have more examples of these, I’ll share them in this post.

Alert – when fully open, this one looks similar to the Slider.

However, the beauty of it is the ability to close it as well. This is one to experiment with when it comes to alerting people to the mastermind or some other sale that I might be doing.

Each hello bar has full customisation, from the design template through to colours

and even the option to switch from a headline and sign up form, to a yes/no question format.

In settings you can select when you’d like it to appear via:

• timers, like 5 seconds through to 60 second delays
• actions, like scrolling or an intent to exit

I’ll do a video soon to show how to configure the targeting, which can be everyone on your site through to specific pages or groups of pages.

And lastly, conversions. You have the ability to connect it to your email marketing system so you can collect email addresses – from Mailchimp through to Infusionsoft.

However, there is the ability to do this manually through the system collecting the emails for you. HelloBar also comes with its own email campaigns function, which I’ve not tried.

As you can see from the top of each image, you can also see what your pop up looks like on different devices.

HelloBar is beta testing Content Upgrades. I’ll do another post on these soon.

HelloBar Analytics and Testing to increase website conversion

One of the greatest things about HelloBar is how easily you’re able to read the analytics. As you’ve seen from images above, it clearly shows you how many people have seen the pop up, what action the pop up is asking for (clicks or sign ups) and how many converted.

If something isn’t working, the ability to click the wheel at the side of a campaign to easily split test it makes doing tests simple. Often, the complexity of software scares many of my clients off wanting to do tests.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, we often feel that all the effort that goes into changing a button colour or switching up a headline can feel wasted when you get a mere 1 or 2 extra email subscribers. But when it’s as simple as it is here, you’re more likely to try.

So that’s my Hellobar review – a snapshot of just how easy it is to be able to increase your website conversion by 8% simply through adding a pop up.

If you’d like to gain more inspiration for your pop ups and discover some clever strategies to increase website conversions, then make sure to watch the training with Lindsey from HelloBar. It’s worth your while!

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